by Keary Taylor
Avian called out as he slipped. I looked back at him just as I crested the side of the building.
I shouldn’t have gotten distracted.
An iron fist gripped around my throat, lifting me from the ladder. It held me extended out at a perfect ninety degree angle, dangling me over the side of the building.
Instinct brought my hands to my neck and I could have killed myself for dropping my weapon.
“Eve!” Avian screamed from below me. His rifle clanged against the ladder as he swung it around and pointed it in our direction.
“Shoot it!” I tried to scream but it came out as a strangled gurgle.
“I can’t get a clear shot, not without hitting you!”
“Just shoot!”
There was a moment of hesitation. I clawed at the Bane’s hands, staring into its dead eyes. Avian wouldn’t be able to shoot me in order to kill it. The Bane would throw me off the edge of the roof and then it would infect Avian.
Blood sprayed in my face. I felt a hole tear through the fleshy under part of my right arm.
Metal exploded in my face as the bullet caught the Bane in the chest. Its hand released me as it fell back.
I was falling.
“Eve!”
And then my chest caught the concrete ledge of the building.
More of my skin was scraped away as I clawed to gain purchase. I slipped back and down, my shirt catching and being pulled up. A chunk of rebar that was exposed in the side of the building caught my stomach, shredding my skin and drawing blood.
I couldn’t catch myself in time.
The air whooshed around me.
And then my arm felt as if it was yanked out of socket.
“Hang on!” Avian shouted.
His long, strong fingers were wrapped around my wrist. Thankfully my good one. The one that was still covered in skin.
A smile crossed Avian’s lips as he looked down at me, and a second later, a laugh bubbled up out of him.
I couldn’t help but laugh too. I was dangling twenty feet in the air, my skin shredded and torn, bleeding like crazy, but I felt alive.
“Eve,” Avian said, his eyes dancing. “Will you wear that dress for me the day after you save the world?”
Metal scraped concrete as a hand smacked the ledge. A moment later the mangled figure of the Bane appeared over the ledge.
“Avian!” I screamed.
His eyes turned up to the roof just as the Bane started climbing over the ledge.
With a primal scream, Avian swung me up with enough force to throw me a few rungs over his head. I slammed into the ladder and scrambled the rest of the way up.
I exploded into the Bane, knocking the two of us back onto the roof.
This time my hands wrapped around its throat. Not wasting a second of momentum, I spun the both of us in a circle before flinging it off the side of the building.
It exploded into a hundred pieces when it landed on the sidewalk far below.
Avian let out another slightly hysterical sounding laugh as he looked up at me and met my eyes again.
“You still didn’t ask the question quite right,” I said with a lopsided grin.
The smile that crossed Avian’s lips was crooked and sly. He finished scaling the ladder and stood before me, no more than an inch of space between us.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out something tiny.
It was a plain, simple band, shiny silver colored.
“Eve,” Avian breathed. I looked up into his eyes. They were blue, and burning so bright. “Will you fight by my side until the end of our days? By my side—not with me standing behind you or locked up in the hospital. Side by side.”
I licked my bottom lip just once as the smile spread on my face.
“Now that is the right way to ask the question,” I said as I leaned into him. His lips brushed mine, sending electricity that should have killed me through my entire body. “Yes.”
Avian’s free hand came to the small of my back, crushing my body into his. His lips engulfed mine and for a moment I could have sworn we were both flying.
He had promised me that when he did ask the question, it would be grand and that I would be speechless.
It was grand. But the words had come without a second’s thought as to what my answer would be.
It had always been Avian.
THIRTY
ONE DAY UNTIL SET OFF
There had been many long nights over the course of my life. The night the Bane burned our gardens in the mountains. The night Sarah died. Being tortured in Seattle. I wasn’t sure if that night was the longest, but it certainly made the top five.
After Avian’s proposal, he and I returned to the hospital. Graye was angry that I’d run off, but it was nothing compared to Royce’s fury. He’d pointed a gun at Avian and told me to get inside and stay there.
I surrendered my radio because I knew if I kept hearing the updates I would break someone until they let me out again to help. I left the lobby because Royce commanded me to. I took a hot shower to try and ebb back the action that demanded to be let out from my body. I sat and watched my skin heal beneath my new ring, trying to zone myself out.
Nothing helped, but thankfully, time continued to pass despite my suffering.
In the morning, it was exactly the same story.
The soldiers rotated. Everyone was still alive, no one had been touched by the twelve other Bane they found that night. West and Vee came inside, and Avian went out.
Maybe I really would die before I could send out that kill code. It was bad enough worrying about West and Vee and all the other soldiers I cared about. Avian was a whole different cause of panic.
“Were they on foot?” I asked, following West and Vee as they headed for the kitchen. They were filthy, covered in sweat despite the cold temperatures outside. They both smelled of gunpowder. “Did they get any more trucks? How close to the perimeter did they get?”
“Yes, all on foot,” Vee answered without looking at me, but her voice was perfectly calm and even. “No more trucks. They were about seven blocks out.”
“There was a lot of gunfire last night, but everything went off without a hitch, Eve,” West said as we stepped into the kitchen. He grabbed a tray and handed it to Vee before getting another for himself. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack before you can set off the Nova tomorrow if you don’t calm down.”
Tomorrow.
Finally. But still, so far away.
The woman working at the counter dishing out food looked at me expectantly, but I shook my head. I was too on edge to eat.
“The trucks were pretty bad,” I said, shaking my head. Vee and West, trays now loaded with food, went for a table. I followed them. “But I can guarantee that won’t be all the Bane will come at us with.”
“Eve, we’ve got tanks positioned on all sides of the hospital,” West said as he shoved half a roll in his mouth. “We have about twenty guards outside. We only have to survive another twenty-four hours and it will all be over. Any update on Jeb?” he abruptly changed the subject.
“Things are looking good so far,” I said absentmindedly. “It had only been a few minutes from when he was touched to when he started the extraction process.”
“Well that’s good,” West said, his voice still sounding slightly annoyed.
Seeing there was no use arguing with him anymore, I shut up. I looked up at Vee, and her expression told me she was as unsure about this working as I was.
I sat back and watched the others around us as West and Vee ate. Almost everyone in the dining room had been on security detail last night. Tristan, Graye, Raj. They all looked exhausted. But there was a frantic determination in their eyes.
Less than five months. That was how long the Pulse’s clearing had lasted. And even those five months of ease had been marred.
Suddenly I was exhausted too.
I looked back at West, only to find his eyes locked on my left hand. I glanced down and realized he
was staring at my freshly placed ring.
“He proposed,” West stated simply. He didn’t look up at me.
“In a way,” I said, feeling my insides grate and slither at the same time. “But I said yes.”
West raised one eyebrow and then returned to his meal.
“The metal of the ring seems odd,” Vee observed.
“Avian had the ring forged from the bullets I pulled out of him,” I explained, straightening my fingers and looking down at the ring. “That night you both went to the transformer. The night you got infected. He kept them. He made the ring and then had them covered in white gold.”
“How romantic,” West said flatly.
“Knock it off,” I said, fixing him with a steely glare.
“Sorry,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Habit I guess. I am happy for you.”
“Hmm,” I said, still glaring at him.
Vee shifted uncomfortably. And then I felt horrible.
Finished with their breakfast, Vee and West returned their trays.
“We’re going to be on night duty again tonight,” Vee said, standing next to West, her shoulder brushing against his. I saw his fingers twitch slightly, as if he debated taking her hand in his.
“I think we’d better go get some sleep while we’ve got the chance,” he said. He looked at me with genuine concern in his eyes. “Try to relax, Eve. There’s nothing you can do right now. Avian can take care of himself. He’s one of the best marksmen I’ve known.”
I nodded, my stomach turning sour as I did. West placed what he meant to be a comforting hand on my arm for a moment before he turned and walked back down the hall. Vee followed after him, looking back over her shoulder once.
Standing there with my shoulders slumped, it felt as if I were both hollow and filled with a million sharp rocks at the same time. The world was too loud inside the hospital and too quiet from the outside. Except for the occasional shot fired.
“You look like someone should put you out of your misery.”
I turned to see Tristan walking toward me, brushing crumbs off his hands.
“This is wrong,” I said, shaking my head. “It doesn’t feel right.”
Tristan took a breath as if to speak, and then seemed to think better of it. He fiddled there for a moment and then finally started walking forward. “Come on.”
Eager for something to do, I didn’t question him.
He led us straight for the armory. Opening a locked storage container, he brought out a wicked looking weapon.
It had three balancing legs, so this was not a weapon to be walking around with. A deadly accurate scope was attached to the top of it. Jutting out the front was a thin barrel.
I’d heard of one of these before, but never dreamed I’d get to handle one. A DSR 50 sniper rifle.
Tristan handed it over to me before picking up a bag of ammunition.
“Let’s go,” he said with a grin.
He carried the bag of ammo and I followed him silently to the elevator. We stepped out on the blue floor. Walking to the end of the hall, Tristan punched in the code to the door that led to the roof.
Tristan had really gained Royce’s trust if he knew this code.
“Not much need for a guard here,” Tristan said as we stepped out into the bright sunlight of mid-morning. We walked past the broken Pulse to the edge of the roof. “Everyone else is too busy on duty down there.” He nodded with his chin off the side of the building. Looking down, I could see one of the tanks. The firing turret swept from the east side of the building to the west.
“Royce doesn’t have time to babysit you and make sure you don’t get outside,” Tristan said, smiling. “He’s right in not letting you out there. But maybe you can still do some good.”
“It’s times like this that I remember why we got along so well from the first moment we met,” I said, smiling back as I grabbed a magazine from the bag. I snapped it into place.
“Hey,” he said, giving a shrug and a crooked smile. “The feeling’s mutual. Even then I knew you’d save my rear end sometime.”
I glanced over at him before looking back down the thin barrel of the sniper rifle. I could see over a mile out with the high powered scope. What surprised me was that the red targeting dot in the middle flashed.
“The scope is different,” Tristan said. “One of Royce’s creations. It’s designed to scan for cybernetics. If a Bane comes within your sights the flashing will stop.”
“Fantastic,” I said through a smile. I didn’t think I’d ever used that word before in my life.
Tristan lingered, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Are you supposed to be my babysitter today?” I asked. “Avian’s out on duty right now and West’s a dead man walking with how tired he is. Does that leave you?”
Tristan laughed out loud, a sharp barking sound. “Technically yes, but I’m feeling a bit delirious myself. I’m going to get some shut eye and hope you can behave yourself.”
Lowering the DSR 50, I turned to Tristan. “Actually, I think I’m good now. Thanks for this. I don’t feel quite so useless anymore.”
He gave another smile before turning and going back down the door into the hospital.
Facing the edge of the building once more, I brought the rifle back up to eye level and looked down the scope.
I crossed to each side of the building, checking every road. We had a guard positioned in the middle of every street that led into the hospital, exactly five blocks out, just as Graye had ordered. Each of those guards paced. They held their assault rifles at the ready, fingers hovering. There were eighteen ways to get access to the hospital directly. Men, women, and even two teenagers from the Underground, stood guard.
That was a quick way to get over the tension that had built between the two colonies. When your existence as a human being is about to be wiped out, you tend to get over your differences and work together.
This surge of Bane once again had been good for something.
Seeing that we had all the entrances covered, I searched out Avian. Gabriel was positioned on the northeast side of the building. Even Wix was out there with a gun. It looked bigger than him. He helped watch the west side. I smiled at that. That was the least likely direction an attack would come from.
I finally found Avian at the south side of the building. The direction the Bane were most likely to come at us from.
He stood tall and sure. He held an assault rifle in his hands, but unlike some of the others, his was leveled at his eyes, ready to fire at any half-second. His knees were bent slightly and where the others paced between buildings, across the roads, Avian held perfectly still, pivoting at the waist slightly to scan the roads.
I smiled as I scrutinized him. I’d never gotten the chance to watch him work from afar, when he didn’t know I was observing him. Avian was an impeccable soldier. When he wasn’t worrying about my safety.
I was glad he couldn’t see me up here on the roof of this building.
The sun crept to its highest position in the sky and started sliding toward the west. From my perch, I watched as Bane came in on foot or again attempted to barrel their way through by truck. My breath would still in my chest and my finger would hover at the trigger.
I created a set of rules for myself:
I had to let the soldiers around me take care of the Bane that were within seven blocks of the hospital.
But the second I spotted any further out that that, I took them out.
The first shot I fired drew eyes. Avian met mine, and a slow smile curled on his lips.
I wasn’t leaving the hospital, I was perfectly safe up here. But at least I was useful.
This continued all day long.
I could feel each and every one of the seconds passing like another stitch in my skin. Time sewed me tighter and tighter, until I felt as if my insides were squeezed too hard, my hair even felt too tight, my eyes too compressed.
How many hours were left until we knew if this would w
ork or not?
So my finger nearly pulled the trigger by accident when my radio crackled to life.
“Eve, it’s Dr. Evans.”
“Go ahead,” I said into it.
“Everyone else up here has gone home to the hospital. Can you come over and talk for a bit?”
“Give me ten minutes.”
I stashed the sniper rifle in a corner where it wouldn’t be seen and slipped quietly downstairs. Since the building we had built the Nova on was barely within our five block perimeter, it wasn’t too difficult to sneak behind the guards. Their attention was turned the opposite direction.
I took the elevator this time, climbing all thirty floors. I stepped out onto the roof and took everything in.
Dr. Evans stood facing the Nova, his cybernetic hands clasped behind his back. As soon as he heard the door, he turned.
I stilled instantly, though, when I saw the look on his face, or what was left of it. His left eye no longer showed any traces of ever looking human. But his right was still mostly white and brown and expressed enough emotion to compensate for the rest of his mechanical body. His shoulders were held high, as was his chin.
“It’s done,” he said.
It took me a moment to nod.
It’s done.
“The energy storage devices will require about eighteen hours to charge,” he said. His voice didn’t sound right. Almost like he was talking into a tin can. It was rough, very not-human sounding. “Like your Pulse, this device requires an enormous amount of energy to be set off. Power must be built up for a few hours. And then we can set it off.”
I calculated the time in my head. We would set the Nova off at noon tomorrow.
It stood behind him, beautiful and shiny and brilliant. The dish was mounted to the top, pointing up and slightly east.
“I wish we could do a test first,” he said, his eyes turning up to the sky.
“To see if the satellites in orbit respond?”
He nodded.
Everything in me said this wasn’t going to work. It had been six years since anyone cared about those chunks of metal and technology floating up in space. How could we ever expect them to work?
“But we will only get one shot at this, before we drain our power source.”